‘Everybody’s grandma’ Josephine Cooper dies at 93

Volunteer won national award, helped Food Bank program grow

When Josephine Cooper was growing up in Los Angeles County during the Great Depression, she learned the importance of charity from her parents.

Although they made a modest living for their family of 10, they insisted on sharing with those less fortunate. Her mother would make chicken soup and tortillas to distribute to people living under bridges.

Half a century later, Mrs. Cooper would become a beloved volunteer at the San Diego Food Bank, where she devoted herself to helping others. After 25 years of boxing up food, recruiting volunteers and organizing assembly lines, Mrs. Cooper was honored for her work by the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging in 2004. She was one of 25 outstanding senior volunteers in the nation selected and invited to Washington D.C. to receive the award.

Mrs. Cooper died of liver disease and kidney failure March 1 at her San Diego home. She was 93.

“She was a blessing to our food bank,” said Alex Mancilla, former operations manager. She organized and ran a distribution center from a church in City Heights, helping it become the organization’s largest emergency food-distribution center in the county.

“She was the main person who helped us make that program grow,” said Mike Doody, former director of the Food Bank. “She had a way of getting people to work together and to work hard. She was determined and stubborn, but in a good way. She had a good heart.”

People knew her as “Grandma” because of her selflessness and her devotion to helping hungry children and families. “She reminded people of their Grandma. She was loving to everyone,” Mancilla said. “She was everybody’s Grandma.”

As a widow with a young child in 1979, Mrs. Cooper was helped through a difficult financial time when the Food Bank provided her with groceries. “She dedicated her life to giving back,” said her daughter, Monica Cooper. “She loved life, and she loved people. She was very outgoing, caring and very concerned about our community.”

Cooper said it wasn’t unusual for a local church to call Mrs. Cooper to ask her to aid a needy family. “She would give people food out of her cupboard. Sometimes we would cook a meal for a family living out of their car,” Cooper said. Although Mrs. Cooper was honored to receive the national award for her volunteer work, she said being able to help others was her reward. “She just gave from her heart,” her daughter said.

Mrs. Cooper was confined to a wheelchair in recent years but still attended rallies against budget cuts affecting schools. “She felt that education was very important for everybody, and she wanted to support the schools,” Cooper said.

She was born June 14, 1917, in Morenci, Ariz., to Carmen and Arcadio Gomez. She grew up near Pasadena and graduated from Alhambra High School. As a young woman, she was a folklorico dancer and performed traditional Mexican dances. She was married to Manuel Oliveras for a several years until he died in the early 1940s. She married James Cooper in 1951, and the couple moved to San Diego where she worked for a furniture-cleaning service and a laundry service. He died in 1979.

Mrs. Cooper enjoyed cooking and sewing on an old Singer machine that belonged to her mother.

Mrs. Cooper is survived by her only child, Monica, of San Diego.

Viewing will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. March 25 at Greenwood Mortuary on Imperial Avenue. Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. March 26 at Good News Missionary Baptist Church on Polk Avenue, San Diego.